Arctic Dreams, page 27
Winter darkness shuts off the far view. The cold drives you deep into your clothing, muscles you back into your home. Even the mind retreats into itself.
In winter I try to remember the spring: light so brilliant the eyelid by itself is no protection. You sleep with a strip of felt tied over your eyes. (I would think of Winifred Petchey Marsh, wearing snow goggles with thin slits while she painted on the tundra at Eskimo Point, because sunglasses distorted the colors.) Of air so clear, a vista so open, you thought you would be able to see Iowa from the banks of the Colville, with just a little elevation. But in winter I would also dwell on darkness. A kind of darkness, for example, that afflicts the Kaminuriak caribou: excess killing at the hands of Eskimos, in modern times. Everyone is afraid to say something about it, for fear of being called a racist. It is easier to let the animals go than to confront that tenebrous region in ourselves. The darkness of politics, in the long hours, runs into the darkness of the land. Into anger.
I would think of the Eskimo. The darker side of the human spirit is not refined away by civilization. It is not something we are done with. Eskimo people, in my experience, have, still, a sober knowledge of their capacity for violence, but are reluctant to speak of it to whites because they have been taught that these are the emotions, the impulses, of primitives. We confuse the primitive with the inability to understand how a light bulb works. We confuse the primitive with being deranged. What is truly primitive in us and them, savage hungers, ethical dereliction, we try to pass over; or we leave them, alone, to be changed. They can humiliate you with a look that says they know better.
In the modern ironies of a remote village—satellite televising of game shows, a small boy wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, pasta for dinner with cloth napkins, after a sermon in the Baptist church about the scourge of Communism—even here, especially here, it is possible to catch a glimpse, usually in the preparation for a hunt, of the former power, the superhuman strength and unflinching intensity, of the angakoq. He is an intermediary with darkness. He has qaumaneq, the shaman light, the luminous fire, the inexplicable searchlight that enables him to see in the dark, literally and metaphorically. He reaches for the throat of darkness; that is the primitive, as primitive as an explosion of blood. Out hunting, in the welter of gore, of impetuous shooting, that heady mixture of joy and violence, sometimes it is possible for an outsider to feel the edge of the primitive. Unbridled, it is frightening. It also defeats starvation. And in its enthusiasm for the concrete events of life, it can defeat what weighs against the heart and soul.
Winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the Polar Eskimo call perlerorneq. According to the anthropologist Jean Malaurie, the word means to feel “the weight of life.” To look ahead to all that must be accomplished and to retreat to the present feeling defeated, weary before starting, a core of anger, a miserable sadness. It is to be “sick of life” a man named Imina told Malaurie. The victim tears fitfully at his clothing. A woman begins aimlessly slashing at things in the iglu with her knife. A person runs half naked into the bitter freezing night, screaming out at the village, eating the shit of the dogs. Eventually the person is calmed by others in the family, with great compassion, and helped to sleep. Perlerorneq. Winter.
I would turn over a tiny Dorset mask, the anguished face, in my mind. I recall a day of errors, hunting seals in the ice of the Beaufort Sea. I felt whatever trouble we had had that day was due to my own failures of attitude, though this was self-indulgent thinking. I was skinning a bearded seal on a small ice cake with another man, in silence. The ocean—still as a pane of glass. One call only, from a loon. I thought how the ice under my feet could suddenly melt. I was standing on water over the water. My heart went into my neck. Later we ate. I ate the meat of the seal.
No summer is long enough to take away the winter. The winter always comes. You try to get a feeling for the proportions of a full life, one that confronts everything. An animal dies. You face two central, philosophical questions: What is death, and what is the nature of an animal? You fall asleep on the summer tundra in the streaming light. You awake to the sound of birds—plovers and Lapland longspurs. Inches from your eye, an intense cluster of Parisian blue flowers. A few inches farther a poppy nods under the weight of a bumblebee. Above, cumulus clouds as voluptuous as summer fruits. You roll over and embrace the earth.
A black guillemot flies over the white ice, and then disappears against the dark water.
During the sea-lift passage of the Soodoc north through Davis Strait, en route to Little Cornwallis Island, I got in the habit of spending afternoons in the cab of a large front-loader that was chained down on the deck alongside other pieces of heavy machinery. I could sit there out of the wind and occasional rain, looking out through its spacious windows at the sea and ice. Sometimes I would read in the Pilot of Arctic Canada. Or I would read arctic history with a map spread out in my lap.
The days among the icebergs passed slowly. I sat in my makeshift catbird seat on the deck, or stood watching in the bows, or up on the bridge with my binoculars and sketchbook.
The icebergs were like pieces of Montana floating past. A different geography, I thought, from the one I grew up knowing.
Icebergs create an unfamiliar sense of space because the horizon retreats from them and the sky rises without any lines of compression behind them. It is this perspective that frightened pioneer families on the treeless North American prairies. Too much space, anchored only now and then by a stretch of bur oak savanna. Landscape painting of the T’ang and Sung dynasties (seventh to twelfth centuries) used this arrangement of space to create the sense of a large presence beyond. Indeed, the subject of such paintings was often their apparent emptiness.
American landscape painting in the nineteenth century, to return to an earlier thought, reveals a struggle with light and space that eventually set it apart from a contemporary European tradition of pastoral landscapes framed by trees, the world viewed from a carriage window. American painters meant to locate an actual spiritual presence in the North American landscape. Their paintings, according to art historians of the period, were the inspirations of men and women who “saw the face of God” in the prairies and mountains and along the river bottoms. One of the clearest expressions of this recasting of an understanding of what a landscape is were the almost austere compositions of the luminists. The atmosphere of these paintings is silent and contemplative. They suggest a private rather than a public encounter with the land. Several critics, among them Barbara Novak in her study of this period in American art, Nature and Culture, have described as well a peculiar “loss of ego” in the paintings. The artist disappears. The authority of the work lies, instead, with the land. And the light in them is like a creature, a living, integral part of the scene. The landscape is numinous, imposing, real. It ceases to be, as it was in Europe, merely symbolic.
At the height of his critical and popular acclaim in 1859, Frederic Edwin Church, one of the most prominent of the luminists, set sail for waters off the Newfoundland coast. He wanted to sketch the icebergs there. They seemed to him the very embodiment of light in nature. Following a three-week cruise, he returned to his studio in New York to execute a large painting.
The small field sketches he made—some are no larger than the palm of your hand—have a wonderful, working intimacy about them. He captures both the monolithic inscrutability of icebergs and the weathered, beaten look they have by the time they arrive that far south in the Labrador Sea. Looking closely at one drawing, made on July 1, I noticed that Church had penciled underneath it the words “strange supernatural.”
The oil painting he produced from these sketches came to be called The Icebergs. It is so imposing—6 feet by 10 feet wide—a viewer feels he can almost step into it, which was Church’s intent. In the foreground is a shelf of ice, part of an iceberg that fills most of the painting and which rises abruptly in the left foreground. On the right, the flooded ice shelf becomes part of a wave-carved grotto. In the central middle ground is a becalmed embayment, opening onto darker ocean waters to the left, which continue to a stormy horizon and other, distant icebergs. Dominating the background on the far side of the embayment is a high wall of ice and snow that carries all the way to the right of the painting. In the ocean air above is a rolling mist. The shading and forms of the icebergs are expertly limned—Church was an avid naturalist, and conscientious about such accuracy—and the colors, though slightly embellished, are true.
There are two oddities about this now very famous American landscape painting. When it was undraped at Gaupil’s Gallery in New York on April 24, 1861, the reaction was more reserved than the lionized Church had anticipated. But The Icebergs differed from the rest of Church’s work in one, crucial aspect: there was no trace of man in it. Convinced that he had perhaps made a mistake, Church took the work back to his studio and inserted in the foreground a bit of flotsam from a shipwreck, a portion of the main-topmast with the crow’s nest. The painting was then exhibited in Boston, where it was no better received than it had been in New York. Only when it arrived in London did critics and audiences marvel. “A most weird and beautiful picture,” wrote a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian. England, with its longer history of arctic exploration and whaling and but a few years removed from the tragedy of Sir John Franklin, was certainly more appreciative, at least, of its subject matter.
The second oddity is that Church’s painting “disappeared” for 116 years. It was purchased in 1863 by a Sir Edward Watkin, after the London showing, to hang at his estate outside Manchester, called Rose Hill. It then passed by inheritance through Watkin’s son to a purchaser of the estate; and then, by donation, to Saint Wilfred’s Church nearby (which returned it to Rose Hill with regrets about its size). By 1979 Rose Hill had become the Rose Hill Remand Home for Boys, and The Icebergs, hanging without a frame in a stairwell, had been signed by one of the boys. Unaware of its value and seeking funds for the reform school’s operation, the owners offered it for sale. The painting was brought back to New York and sold at auction on October 25, 1979, for $2.5 million, the highest price paid to that time for a painting in America. It now hangs in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, in Texas.
Church’s decision to add the broken mast to The Icebergs speaks, certainly, to his commercial instincts, but the addition, I think, is more complex than this; and such a judgment is both too cynical and too simple.
Try as we might, we ultimately can make very little sense at all of nature without resorting to such devices. Whether they are such bald assertions of human presence as Church’s cruciform mast or the intangible, metaphorical tools of the mind—contrast, remembrance, analogy—we bring our own worlds to bear in foreign landscapes in order to clarify them for ourselves. It is hard to imagine that we could do otherwise. The risk we take is of finding our final authority in the metaphors rather than in the land. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.
A comparison with cathedrals has come to many Western minds in searching for a metaphor for icebergs, and I think the reasons for it are deeper than the obvious appropriateness of line and scale. It has to do with our passion for light.
Cathedral architecture signaled a quantum leap forward in European civilization. The gothic cathedral churches, with their broad bays of sunshine, flying buttresses that let windows rise where once there had been stone in the walls, and harmonious interiors—this “architecture of light” was a monument to a newly created theology. “God is light,” writes a French cultural historian of the era, Georges Duby, and “every creature stems from that initial, uncreated, creative light.” Robert Grosseteste, the twelfth-century founder of Oxford University, wrote that “physical light is the best, the most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies that exist.”
Intellectually, the eleventh and twelfth centuries were an age of careful dialectics, a working out of relationships that eventually became so refined they could be expressed in the mathematics of cathedrals. Not only was God light but the relationship between God and man was light. The cathedrals, by the very way they snared the sun’s energy, were an expression of God and of the human connection with God as well. The aesthetics of this age, writes Duby, was “based on light, logic, lucidity, and yearning for a God in a human form.” Both the scholastic monks in their exegetical disquisitions and the illiterate people who built these churches, who sent these structures soaring into the sky—157 feet at Beauvais before it fell over on them—both, writes Duby, were “people trying to rise above their poverty through dreams of light.”
It was an age of mystics. When Heinrich Suso, a Dominican monk, prayed at night in church, “it often seemed as if he were floating on air or sailing between time and eternity, on the deep tide of the unsoundable marvels of God.” And it was an age of visionaries who spoke of the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, where there would be no darkness.
The erection of these monuments to spiritual awareness signaled a revival of cities, without which these edifices could not have survived. (The money to build them came largely from an emerging class of merchants and tradesmen, not royalty.) In time, however, the cathedrals became more and more esoteric, so heavily intellectualized an enterprise that, today, the raw, spiritual desire that was their original impetus seems lost. To the modern visitor, familiar with an architecture more facile and clever with light, the cathedrals now seem dark. Their stone has been eaten away by the acids and corrosives of industrial air. The age of mystics that bore them gave way rather too quickly to an age of rational intellects, of vast, baroque theological abstraction.
A final, ironic point: the mathematics that made the building of the cathedrals possible was carefully preserved by Arabs and Moors, by so-called infidels.
By the thirteenth century, Europe was starting to feel the vastness of Asia, the authority of other cultures. “The dissemination of knowledge,” writes Duby, “and the strides made in the cultural sphere had opened [European] eyes and forced them to face facts: the world was infinitely larger, more various, and less docile than it had seemed to their forefathers; it was full of men who had not received the word of God, who refused to hear it, and who would not be easily conquered by arms. In Europe the days of holy war were over. The days of the explorers, traders, and missionaries had begun. After all, why persist in struggling against all those infidels, those expert warriors, when it was more advantageous to negotiate and attempt to insinuate oneself in those invincible kingdoms by business transactions and peaceful preaching?”
This was the philosophy that carried the Portuguese to India, the Spaniards to Peru, and the French and British into the hinterlands of northern North America. Hundreds of years later, a refinement on this philosophy of acquisition propelled Americans, Canadians, and Russians into the Arctic.
The conventional wisdom of our rime is that European man has advanced by enormous strides since the age of cathedrals. He has landed on the moon. He has cured smallpox. He has harnessed the power in the atom. Another argument, however, might be made in the opposite direction, that all European man has accomplished in 900 years is a more complicated manipulation of materials, a more astounding display of his grasp of the physical principles of matter. That we are dazzled by mere styles of expression. That ours is not an age of mystics but of singular adepts, of performers. That the erection of the cathedrals was the last wild stride European man made before falling back into the confines of his intellect.
Of the sciences today, quantum physics alone seems to have found its way back to an equitable relationship with metaphors, those fundamental tools of the imagination. The other sciences are occasionally so bound by rational analysis, or so wary of metaphor, that they recognize and denounce anthropomorphism as a kind of intellectual cancer, instead of employing it as a tool of comparative inquiry, which is perhaps the only way the mind works, that parallelism we finally call narrative.
There is a word from the time of the cathedrals: agape, an expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that is “to be sharing life with other life.” Agape is love, and it can mean “the love of another for the sake of God.” More broadly and essentially, it is a humble, impassioned embrace of something outside the self, in the name of that which we refer to as God, but which also includes the self and is God. We are clearly indebted as a species to the play of our intelligence; we trust our future to it; but we do not know whether intelligence is reason or whether intelligence is this desire to embrace and be embraced in the pattern that both theologians and physicists call God. Whether intelligence, in other words, is love.
One day, sitting in my accustomed spot on the cargo deck of the Soodoc, I turned to see the second engineer, who had brought two cups of coffee. He was from Guyana. We talked about Guyana, and about the icebergs, some forty or fifty of which were then around us. He raised his chin to indicate and said, “How would you like to live up there? A fellow could camp up there, sail all the way to Newfoundland. Get off at Saint John’s. How about it?” He laughed.
We laughed together. We searched the horizon for mirages with the binoculars, but we were not successful. When his break was over, the engineer went back below decks. I hung over the bow, staring into the bow wave at the extraordinary fluidity of that geometry on the calm waters of Melville Bay. I looked up at the icebergs. They so embodied the land. Austere. Implacable. Harsh but not antagonistic. Creatures of pale light. Once, camped in the Anaktiktoak Valley of the central Brooks Range in Alaska, a friend had said, gazing off across that broad glacial valley of soft greens and straw browns, with sunlight lambent on Tulugak Lake and the Anaktuvuk River in the distance, that it was so beautiful it made you cry.
